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EPY510: Introduction to
Educational Psychology

Historical development of psychology

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

Historical development of psychology

The roots of modern psychology can be traced to philosophy and physiology in the 4th and 5th
centuries B.C.

The Greek philosopher’s Socrates plato and Aristotle passed fundamental questions about
metal life, e.g

Are you sure you are alive? Do people perceive reality correctly? What is consciousness? Are
people inherently rational or irritational? Are people capable of free choices? etc .

The questions are important now as they were two thousand years ago. They deal with the
nature and mental process rather than with the nature of the body or behavior

The biological (physiological) perspective has an equally long history. Hippocrates, is credited
as the “father of medicine lived roughly the same time as Socrates. He was much interested in
physiology (the branch of biology that studies the normal functions of the living organisms and
its parts.)

He made many important observations about how the brain controls various organs of the body.
This set the stage for the modern approach to physiological/biological perspectives in
psychology.

The beginning of psychology involved some mixing of the questions of philosophy, and the
methods of physiology, but these two approaches were district enough to emerge as cognitive
and biological perspectives to psychology.

SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Controversy surrounds many psychological issues, mostly because of basic differences in the
way different psychologists see the nature of human beings within the field, bitter disputes
erupted (as happens in any enterprise filled with creative, strong minded innovators)

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

Some of these controversies are eventually resolved when one viewpoint comes to be generally
accepted, but others have continues for years and show no signs of leading to universal
agreement.

Many of these controversies were born in the early days of psychology with the emergence in
the late 19th and 20th centuries of a number of different schools- groups of psychologists who
shared theoretical outlook.

As these schools flourished, and then declined, the history of psychology was written. Seven
schools of thought emerged

STRUCTURALISM

Wilhelm Wundt M.D (1832-1920) is usually called the “father of Psychology”. He called himself
a psychologist and he established the first laboratory for psychologist and he established the
first laboratory for psychological experimentation in Leipzig, Germany.

Wendt merged both physiological and philosophical traditions into the field of psychological. He
established psychology as a laboratory science that used methods derived from physiology

Wendt wanted to study the basic structure of the human mind (what it is) rather than its
functions or purpose (what it does).

To do this, he developed a method (of) called analytical introspection (self observation). He

then proceeded to analyze or break down the mind into its component elements example of
perception and coin.

He work ran into considerable resistance partly because some of his colleagues and students
trough that much examination of the mind could cause insanity while others felt that such
experiments would “insult religion by putting human soul on a pair of scales”.

Finally the method was not truly scientific because each introspectionist (who had to be
vigorously trained in the method) describes his own sensations uniquely and there was little
consistency from one observer to another.

One of Wundt’s students Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927), took structuralism to

Americas. He believed that the new science of psychology should analyze consciousness by

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

reducing it to its elemental units: the structure of the human mind was made up of more
than30,000 separate sensations, feelings and images.

Structuralism died with Titchener in 1927 because of left out important topics such as
motivation, emotions, individual differences and psychological disorders.

Furthermore, isolating the individual elements of the human mind seemed unnatural and silly to
many people.

FUNCTIONALISM

It was started by John Dewy (1859-1952) by John James (1842-1910). In their concern with the
way an organism adapts to its environment, they wanted to know how the mind functions i.e
what it does.

They developed many research methods beyond introspection. They included questionnaire
mental tests and objectives description of behavior. They also broadened their subject base
beyond trained introspectionist. They used children, animals and the mentally retarded.

John Dewey is widely credited for introducing functionalism to the American system of
education. He felt emphasis of education should not be on the needs of students.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

Gestalt is a German word that means form or pattern or configuration. This school of
psychology was started by three psychologists Mas Wertheimer (1880-1943) Kurt Koffka (1887-
1941) and Wolfgang Kohlrer (1887-1967).

They advanced the idea that it is not the individual elements in the mind that are important ( as
structuralisms had maintained), but the gestalt, the pattern that these elements form in
constructing a unified whole.

For example, they emphasized the importance of a new entity formed by its different elements
e.g a melody formed by a combination of individual notes, or the perception of a leafy tree.

The Gestaltists acknowledged consciousness but they just refused to look at it in little pieces.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

When Sigmund freud (1856-1939) developed the therapeutic technique called

He complemented Wundt “psychology of the unconscious”. Psychoanalysis did not try to be a

pure science. Its emphasis was not the immediate application of a new way to treat people who
showed abnormal behavior. It drew much of its data from clinical observation rather than
controlled laboratory experimentation.

Freud believes that powerful biological urges, most often sexual in nature, influenced human
behavior.

He felt that these drives were unconscious and that they created conflict within the individual
and between individual and the standards of society, hence, the psychoanalytic school sees
people in constant conflict between their biological urges and the need to tame them.

While it had an enormous influence on psychological thought, it has never become part of
mainstream experimental generated a lot of storm of controversy, some of which are still raging
today

BEHAVIOURISM

Was started by John B. Watson (1878-1958) with

the publication of his articles in 1913 entitled
“psychology as the behaviorist views it”.

This school grew out of studies of animal

behavior. The behaviorists saw no point in trying
to figure out what people were seeing or feeling
as structuralisms did) they believed these issues
could not be addressed objectively and
scientifically instead, they focused on what they
couls actually see people doing. In other words, they studies observable behaviours and
events.

They replaced introspection as a research method with laboratory studies of a basic type of
learning called Conditioning.

They believed that if they could determine how a person or animal would respond to a particular
kind of stimulus, they could learn what was most important about behavior.

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

With this orientation, the nature of research shifted to experiments with animals and work on
learning. The behaviorist emphasized the role of environment in shaping human nature and
down played hereditary factors.

OPERANT CONDITIONING

B.F Skinner came up with the concept of operant conditioning as a mode of learning. Operant
conditioning is a type of learning in which an animal or a person learns to make certain
responses to get a reward or to avoid punishment.

While Skinner used rats and pigeons to determine the effect of different patterns of
reinforcement (rewards), he also did a great deal of work directly applicable to people.

The behaviouristic school of thought helped psychology to become a truly scientific discipline
and shaped the field for years to come, despite the fact that it was not able to deal with other
psychological factors that could not be seen (observed) e.g thought, feelings, emotions, etc.

A major objection of behaviouristic approach is its denial of cognitive processed. This concern
led to the emergence of cognitive psychology

COGNITIVE SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY

This perspective is in part a return to the cognitive roots of psychology (functionalism and
Gestaltist approaches) and in part a reaction to the narrowness of behaviorism and the S-B view
(stimulus – reaction or response) – both of which tended to neglect complex human activities
like reasoning, planning, decision machining and communication

Cognitive psychology is concerned with mental processes e.g perceiving , remembering

deciding and problem solving but unlike the 19th century version, however, it is not based on
introspection , but it is based on the assumptions that:-

i. Only by the study of mental processes can we fully understand what organisms do.
ii. We can study mental processes in an objective fashion by focusing on specific
behaviors (just as behaviorists do) but interpreting them in terms of underlying mental
processed.

In making this interpretation, cognitive psychologists often rely on analogy between the mind
and computer whereby incoming information is processed in various ways:-

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MASENO UNIVERSITY EPY510: Introduction to Educational Psychology

It is selected, compared and combined with other information in the memory, transformed,
rearranged ect. E.g. when we interpret somebody’s behavior essentially we are engaging in a
form of reasoning e.g. what is its most likely cause , why is he or she behaving that way.
Another example is on aggressive behavior.

If someone insults you, you are for less likely to return the verbal aggression if the person is a
mental patient, but if it is an acquaintance chances are high that you will respond to the
aggressive behavior.

In both the above cases, the stimulus situation is roughly the same, but what is roughly the
same, but you know about each of the persons and it is this knowledge (cognition) that controls
your behavior

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

It is also known as phenomenological perspective. It focuses almost on subjective experiences

of events – the individual‘s phenomenology.

This approach developed partly as a reaction to what phenomenologist’s perceived as overly

mechanistic quality of the other perspectives to psychology. Thus phenomenological
psychologists tend to reject the notion that behavior is controlled by external stimuli
(behaviorism) or by straight forward processing of information and memory (cognitive
psychology) or by unconscious impulses (psychoanalytic)

Also phenomenologists have different goals from psychologists operating from other
perspectives: They are concerned more with describing the inner life and experiences of
individuals than with developing theories or predicting behavior

They argue that an individual is free to choose and determine his actions. Consequently each
person and cannot blame the environment, his/her actions and cannot blame the environment ,
his/her parents or circumstances for what s/he does.

Phenomenologist emphasizes those “HUMAN” qualities that distinguish man from animals –
primarily his free will and his drive towards self actualization.

The main drive for human beings is at tendency towards growth and self – actualization. Every
person has a need to develop his potential to the fullest, to progress beyond what he is now.

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He may not know which path leads to growth, and he may be blocked by all kinds of
environmental and cultural tendency is towards actualization of his potential.

This approach also stresses the good naturalness of man as well as life here and now as
important and not what happened to the individual in childhood.